It helps gather information about the Earth and lately has been broadly employed to map the impacts of natural hazards. Copernicus Emergency Management System, in particular Rapid Mapping, is a solution that has been established to support emergency responders in improving emergency management through the exploitation of satellite data. The service provides maps of damage assessment and pre-event situations based on satellite images. The maps are ready for use within hours or days after an emergency. The delivery time depends on how quickly the satellite collects the imagery of the affected area. The imagery processing part generally takes a few hours.
Automatic delineation and classification of affected areas, mainly rely on indexes that can be deterministically computed using satellite data products: Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) is used to map burned areas Normalized Difference Water Index(NDWI) and Modified NDWI (MNDWI) are used to map flooded areas.
A demonstration of the potential of the technology used in the Overwatch project.
Pre-event image: ESRI World Imagery © DigitalGlobe (acquired on 09/08/2021, GSD 0.5m, approx. 0% cloud coverage in AoI).
Post-event image: Pléiades-1A/B © CNES (2022), distributed by Airbus DS (acquired on 18/09/2022 at 10:20 UTC, GSD 0.5 m, approx., 0% cloud coverage in AoI, 32.5° off-nadir angle), provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA, all rights reserved.
Reference: Copernicus Emergency Management Service.
Project funded in the Horizon Europe Programme (CALL:HORIZON-EUSPA-2021-SPACE) under Grant Agreement 101082320
